The Cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a Cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-user as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical compute engines, servers and devices, device memory, storage devices, networks, business applications and other software, and the like.
Cloud computing is evolving toward a mature computing environment. In Cloud computing, security services are currently limited to those provided by the Cloud infrastructure or by the customers of the Cloud themselves. This type of specialization and availability of these types of services often occurs several years after the establishment of the basic business model and supporting infrastructure. As such, optimal security is often lacking within many Cloud computing environments.